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cyberdad
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03 Jun 2022, 5:44 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
Maybe their meter was the half of the arm span of some big dude at that the time. It wouldnt follow that it was evidence that they knew the size of the earth.

Your own data shows that your facts are wrong, and even if your facts were right they still wouldnt prove your point.


The precision used to build the oldest structure (The Great pyramid) suggest the original builders had advanced mathematical knowledge. The precision of building alignment was facing cardinal north and markers for calendar events such as the equinox suggest they knew the earth was round/orbited the sun etc...

The rods BTW found in the tomb of Tutankhamun's treasurer were used for measurement but there was no evidence they were used for building construction and secondly the rods were actually made 2000 years after the great pyramid was built (the most advanced structure was already ancient at the time of Tutenkhamun).

While its possible to infer the use of the cubit in the new kingdom, its not as clear what units of measurement were used in the old kingdom. Again you missed my underlying point that the earliest structures used the most advanced precisions and as time progressed the level of technology/sophistication applied seemed to go backward.



naturalplastic
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04 Jun 2022, 3:37 am

cyberdad wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
Maybe their meter was the half of the arm span of some big dude at that the time. It wouldnt follow that it was evidence that they knew the size of the earth.

Your own data shows that your facts are wrong, and even if your facts were right they still wouldnt prove your point.


The precision used to build the oldest structure (The Great pyramid) suggest the original builders had advanced mathematical knowledge. The precision of building alignment was facing cardinal north and markers for calendar events such as the equinox suggest they knew the earth was round/orbited the sun etc...

The rods BTW found in the tomb of Tutankhamun's treasurer were used for measurement but there was no evidence they were used for building construction and secondly the rods were actually made 2000 years after the great pyramid was built (the most advanced structure was already ancient at the time of Tutenkhamun).

While its possible to infer the use of the cubit in the new kingdom, its not as clear what units of measurement were used in the old kingdom. Again you missed my underlying point that the earliest structures used the most advanced precisions and as time progressed the level of technology/sophistication applied seemed to go backward.


We are not talking about the underlying belief you have that you were trying to prove (which seems to be a belief that space aliens landed on Earth one day in 3000 BC and gave the Egyptians futuristic technology). We are talking about the one thing you said. You said "the Egyptians discovered the meter".

You have to admit that the statement that the "Egyptians discovered the meter" is both illogical (you invent a measurement system, you dont discover it), and is factually wrong (you admit that they in fact did NOT have the meter, nor any measurement like it).

You dont know how to have a conversation. Let me help you.

What you need to do is to acknowledge your mistake, and say "yes, I Cyberdad, messed up. The Egyptians did not either invent nor discover the meter, and even if they had done that it wouldnt prove that they came up with the unit the same way it was done in 1793- by basing it on the size of the earth."

Then you can go on to say "forget the metric system. I, Cyberdad, wanna talk about something else entirely. I wanna talk about the Egyptians having got advanced tech from space aliens".

you're welcome. :lol:



cyberdad
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04 Jun 2022, 6:51 am

naturalplastic wrote:
Then you can go on to say "forget the metric system. I, Cyberdad, wanna talk about something else entirely. I wanna talk about the Egyptians having got advanced tech from space aliens".

you're welcome. :lol:


Well I was coming to that but you interrupted my flow!

But on a serious note, isn't it impressive that the base measurements of the great pyramid is 230.252 m, 230.454 m, 230.391 m and 230.357 m. If they didn't know metres then that's still impressive.



naturalplastic
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04 Jun 2022, 7:03 am

You finely stated something clearly.

Yes. They were quite consistant in the sizes of the four sides.

And I admit that that IS kinda curious if thats true. That the sides of the base of the pyramids are that close to being whole round integer multiples of the modern meter. Close enough to make it look like they were using the metric system back in 2600 BC.. But as I already said -that could be a coincidence. Not proof that they knew the size of the Earthback then.



cyberdad
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05 Jun 2022, 1:33 am

naturalplastic wrote:
YClose enough to make it look like they were using the metric system back in 2600 BC.. But as I already said -that could be a coincidence. Not proof that they knew the size of the Earthback then.


Yes I made a slight mistake calling it a "fun fact" when technically it was only fun for me and wasn't really a agreed upon fact.

Another mathematical fact is the geometric position of structures across the ancient world that align with equinoxes and star constellations. What is highly controversial at the moment is Gobleke Tepe's 12,000 year old temples seem to be positioned to align with spring and autumn equinox. These structural alignments can be found in Stonehenge and even earlier structures across Europe and Asia. While it's not proof necessarily it's hard to believe cavemen in the ice age came up with these ideas while thinking the earth is flat or a more common belief among prehistoric Europeans and East Asians that we are riding on the back of a giant turtle.

What might be embarrasing for archaeologists have to explain how hunter gatherers who emerged from caves were able to use advanced calculus to compensate for weight bearing across stone structures (some archaeologists think Palaeolithic people used trial and error for throwing several tonne stone structures to balance on top of each other :roll:



naturalplastic
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05 Jun 2022, 3:43 am

cyberdad wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
YClose enough to make it look like they were using the metric system back in 2600 BC.. But as I already said -that could be a coincidence. Not proof that they knew the size of the Earthback then.


Yes I made a slight mistake calling it a "fun fact" when technically it was only fun for me and wasn't really a agreed upon fact.

Another mathematical fact is the geometric position of structures across the ancient world that align with equinoxes and star constellations. What is highly controversial at the moment is Gobleke Tepe's 12,000 year old temples seem to be positioned to align with spring and autumn equinox. These structural alignments can be found in Stonehenge and even earlier structures across Europe and Asia. While it's not proof necessarily it's hard to believe cavemen in the ice age came up with these ideas while thinking the earth is flat or a more common belief among prehistoric Europeans and East Asians that we are riding on the back of a giant turtle.

r :roll:


On the contrary. Its very easy to imagine hunter gatherers and early farmers being attuned to the night sky, and in the daytime to be attuned to the seasonal movements of the points where the sunrises and sets on the horizon. Easy to imagine because thats what they were, and what hunter gathers of today still are.

Stop defaming yourself by spouting this idiotic nonsense.

Yes- the engineering of Stonehenge, or of Macchu Picchu is a bit of a mystery. But not the astronomy.

The astronomy part is easy for hunter gathers who were more attuned to nature than we modern folks.

Hunter gatherers today build stone cairns that are aligned to the equinoxes, and etc. Small versions of stonehenge.

Cultures around the world that assumed that the earth was a flat disk, was the center of the universe, and that the heavens were a big glass dome over our heads were perfectly able to map out the heavens and to predict the movements of the naked eye planets, the sun, and the moon. Europeans in the middle ages knew that the earth was round (because of Ptolomy fifteen centuries earlier who had measured the earth), but still assumed geocentrism. But that didnt stop them from mapping out the heavens.



cyberdad
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05 Jun 2022, 6:36 am

naturalplastic wrote:
Cultures around the world that assumed that the earth was a flat disk, was the center of the universe.


To quote Arthur C Clarke....Truth will always be far stranger than fiction
https://chandra.harvard.edu/chronicle/0 ... part2.html



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05 Jun 2022, 6:39 am

naturalplastic wrote:
On the contrary. Its very easy to imagine hunter gatherers and early farmers being attuned to the night sky, and in the daytime to be attuned to the seasonal movements of the points where the sunrises and sets on the horizon. Easy to imagine because thats what they were, and what hunter gathers of today still are.
.


Yes I suppose there is some measure of plausibility they can watch the stars but the average hunter gatherer doesn't have the luxury to sit and watch the procession of stars and do complex calculations when they need to hunt to survive. Possible if they have a medicine man or witch doctor smoking magic mushrooms.



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05 Jun 2022, 4:23 pm

Wizard of Oz wrote:
When counting we go to 9 then 10.
I think that we need to loose the 9 and go directly to 10 from 8.


Why lose 9? Whatever did 9 do to you? :)


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naturalplastic
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05 Jun 2022, 4:49 pm

Joe90 wrote:
Wizard of Oz wrote:
When counting we go to 9 then 10.
I think that we need to loose the 9 and go directly to 10 from 8.


Why lose 9? Whatever did 9 do to you? :)


Nine itself is the victim.

Seven ate nine!



naturalplastic
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05 Jun 2022, 5:23 pm

cyberdad wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
On the contrary. Its very easy to imagine hunter gatherers and early farmers being attuned to the night sky, and in the daytime to be attuned to the seasonal movements of the points where the sunrises and sets on the horizon. Easy to imagine because thats what they were, and what hunter gathers of today still are.
.


Yes I suppose there is some measure of plausibility they can watch the stars but the average hunter gatherer doesn't have the luxury to sit and watch the procession of stars and do complex calculations when they need to hunt to survive. Possible if they have a medicine man or witch doctor smoking magic mushrooms.


Modern Bushmen call the Milky Way "the backbone of the sky" because theyre aware that in their southern hemisphere setting thats what the milky way looks like- a central strut supporting the sky. Even today modern hunter gatherers are very aware of their own particular culture's constellations.

They didnt have the luxury?

Thats a modern myth that hunters gathers lack spare time. The invention of farming created more work, not less. And made life less predictable and not more so. The only advantage to adopting agriculture was demographic. Farming supported more humans per square mile. Thats why farming took over. The few thousand lazy healthy cave people got crowded out by the millions of undernourished, unhealthy, over worked peasant farmers.

Modern hunter gatherers dont actually work longer hours than walmart employees do today. And the time that they do spend "at the office" foraging for food is spent out in nature observing nature.

But the point is that we inherited astronomy from our hunter gatherer ancestors sitting around the camp fire who weaved tales about the constellations they saw. Astronmers still classify newly discovered stars and exoplanets and galaxies by what constellation (region of the sky) the new thing is located in. We got the constellations from our primitive ancestors.

Early farmers, and even some hunter gatherers would have had some specialization, and had shamans who kept track of where on the horizon line the sun rose on the solistice. SO when they got around to raising stone monuments they could align the stones with the sunrise. Also the stone age was not just one weekend. Stone age folks had many generations to accumulate knowledge and lore in world that didnt change as fast as our world does. So even if individuals lacked time to get data, the community as a whole had a lot of time over time to accumulate lore about the sky.



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06 Jun 2022, 1:37 am

naturalplastic wrote:
Modern Bushmen call the Milky Way "the backbone of the sky" because theyre aware that in their southern hemisphere setting thats what the milky way looks like- a central strut supporting the sky. Even today modern hunter gatherers are very aware of their own particular culture's constellations.

They didnt have the luxury?

Thats a modern myth that hunters gathers lack spare time. The invention of farming created more work, not less. And made life less predictable and not more so. The only advantage to adopting agriculture was demographic. Farming supported more humans per square mile. Thats why farming took over. The few thousand lazy healthy cave people got crowded out by the millions of undernourished, unhealthy, over worked peasant farmers.

Modern hunter gatherers dont actually work longer hours than walmart employees do today. And the time that they do spend "at the office" foraging for food is spent out in nature observing nature.

But the point is that we inherited astronomy from our hunter gatherer ancestors sitting around the camp fire who weaved tales about the constellations they saw. Astronmers still classify newly discovered stars and exoplanets and galaxies by what constellation (region of the sky) the new thing is located in. We got the constellations from our primitive ancestors.

Early farmers, and even some hunter gatherers would have had some specialization, and had shamans who kept track of where on the horizon line the sun rose on the solistice. SO when they got around to raising stone monuments they could align the stones with the sunrise. Also the stone age was not just one weekend. Stone age folks had many generations to accumulate knowledge and lore in world that didnt change as fast as our world does. So even if individuals lacked time to get data, the community as a whole had a lot of time over time to accumulate lore about the sky.


Yes the topic you are referring to is called archaeo-astronomy. The problem we have is not that the hunter gatherers were not capable of undersrtanding star constellations. It's more to do with their apparent ability to calculate where particular stars will appear or what day of the year the sun will rise (please remember these tribal folk didn't have access to a Roman calendar). When you combine this with their ability in prehistory to do calculus to measure weight bearing load on stone structures like arches then one wonders why we celebrate European mathematicians as discovering various concepts?

BTW did you read the Harvard-Smithsonian article I posted about the Dogon tribe of central Mali in Africa? They were aware of a star called Sirius B thousands of years ago (which they claimed sky people came from) which wasn't discovered by Science till the 1970s after the invention of high powered telescopes.



naturalplastic
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06 Jun 2022, 3:06 am

You got things ass-backward. Tribal folks put markers were the sun rose on the equinox- in order create their particular cultures calenders. Thats how our calenders evolved. They built these things because they didnt have calenders, not despite not having calenders. AND they didnt need to know the shape, nor size, of the earth to do it.

Im familiar with the Dogan tribe thing.



cyberdad
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06 Jun 2022, 3:41 am

naturalplastic wrote:
You got things ass-backward. Tribal folks put markers were the sun rose on the equinox- in order create their particular cultures calenders. Thats how our calenders evolved. They built these things because they didnt have calenders, not despite not having calenders. AND they didnt need to know the shape, nor size, of the earth to do it.

Im familiar with the Dogan tribe thing.


If people like the Mayans developed a more accurate calendar than the Romans without knowing how to make the wheel then perhaps more people knew about the earth rotating around the sun, being round and being part of a solar system

Heliocentrism was considered a radical idea in ancient Greece and wouldn't be touched by European scholars till 2000 years later by Copernicus who batted colleagues who were adamant the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth.



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06 Jun 2022, 4:04 am

cyberdad wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
You got things ass-backward. Tribal folks put markers were the sun rose on the equinox- in order create their particular cultures calenders. Thats how our calenders evolved. They built these things because they didnt have calenders, not despite not having calenders. AND they didnt need to know the shape, nor size, of the earth to do it.

Im familiar with the Dogan tribe thing.


If people like the Mayans developed a more accurate calendar than the Romans without knowing how to make the wheel then perhaps more people knew about the earth rotating around the sun, being round and being part of a solar system

Heliocentrism was considered a radical idea in ancient Greece and wouldn't be touched by European scholars till 2000 years later by Copernicus who batted colleagues who were adamant the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth.

But thats all irrelevent . You dont need to know the earth is round, nor what size the earth is, nor know that the earth is not the center of the solar system, to map the heavens, and predict the motions of the non-telescope era planets known to the ancients. The Mayans did not have diagrams showing that the sun was the center of the solar system. But they were obsessed with motions of the planets. For example they would schedule wars to start only when Venus did a certain thing in the sky- and they were able to predict years in advance when Venus did that thing.

When an astrologer "does your chart" he/she is simply mapping the sky above your hometown the moment you were born. Neil DeGrasse Tyson could do the same thing for you. Thats because at that stage- the astrologer is not doing astrology, but is doing astroNOMY. The state of the art of the science of astronomy as it was in 2500 BC in Babylonia. Simply mapping the stars.

The interpretation of the star chart (ie using it as a form of divination) is where the "astrology" part comes in.

But the star mapping part is accurate DESPITE the fact its all based upon the assumption that Earth is the center of the universe, and that the other bodies in the sky are smaller satelites of the flat earth that move over the "dome" of the sky that covers the earth.



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06 Jun 2022, 4:24 am

I can't argue against people framing the movement of stars across cycles but how do they keep records if they didn't have telescopes or grids let alone know how to write or draw or do simple math to calculate these cycles?

The Dogon were able to see Sirius B